Make a warm entrance that transitions from one season to another

While many of us display completely different sets of decorations for each holiday, there are ways to transition from one season to the next without a wholesale changing-out of items.

“What I really see is people buying a lot of colorful things for fall including a lot of the natural-like little flowers that have been dyed and glued piece by piece onto a ball,” said Sharon Nelson of Nelson Designs. “They come in all these different colors. You can use them now, and then with Christmas decorations you can put them in a tree.” The flower balls come in sizes from about 3 to 5 inches.

Such decorations also can be piled in bowls.

“More and more people are buying things they can transition into the next holiday. We’re selling a lot of gold, silver,” including gold artichokes, Nelson said. Metals are popular now and can be mixed, going from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

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An ideal place to use transitional materials is the one place that’s almost always decorated seasonally: the entrance to your house.

“On the front door I love to see greenery flowing down around the door, then you can add color.” You can put up artificial greenery, Nelson said, and insert fall colors now, swapping them out for reds and coppers for Christmas.

“Red is what you can see from the farthest distance,” Nelson said of the color that will have the most impact.

Once you’re inside the house, Nelson likes hanging a big mirror in the entryway. A wreath can be hung over the mirror, or a big bowl of greenery can be placed on a table in front of the mirror, into which you can insert reds and coppers, or lime green and coppery brown, or silver and gold, Nelson said.

“If you have a chandelier, it’s always nice to have that reflected in the mirror as well.”

Teresa White of Interiors by Teresa White/Dean’s Designs said she likes to change out some of the paintings on her walls as well as decorative pillows and rugs as the seasons change. If your floors are pretty, even a rug as small as 4 by 6 feet – as long as it’s bigger than the coffee table – can add a fresh jolt of color, perhaps in pink, purple or orange, she said. You also may need to change out a pillow or two to avoid color clashes.

More and more people are buying silver metal antelope and deer heads and throwing wreaths on those, White said.

How to add seating

If you need to add seating for your guests, the trend away from having furniture around the walls will help you out, Nelson said.

“The big, big style right now is taking two sofas and facing them in the living or family room and having a coffee table between them and having the fireplace or TV at the end and making it cozy.

“People are getting to the point where they can have interesting angles. If you have a fireplace, angle two accent chairs on each side, and have your two sofas, and then on the other end, if you have room for more accent chairs you can definitely get more seating in.”

She gave the example of going to a client’s house where the big living room had built-ins and windows, and her team gave such advice. “She’ll have plenty of seating for the holidays, and we planned where the Christmas tree is going to go.”

So where should that Christmas tree go?

“Especially if you have a high ceiling, it’s so neat to take it all the way up,” Nelson said. And not just the tree: “having pieces of furniture and mirrors, things that take your eye up, especially if you have high ceilings, because it draws your eye to that feature. … I see people putting too many little things around.” So she recommends having fewer accessories but bigger pieces such as leaning mirrors, and using finials and candlesticks on fireplaces, “everything to get your eye to go up.”